When a computer system has several devices sharing a resource it may include a mechanism for electing a device to control the remaining devices in order to minimize contention and allow each device an appropriate amount of access to the resource, e.g., master-secondary configuration. This often occurs in, for example, bus architectures, database management and server clusters. The resource shared may be another component device or a communication channel. The component device may be a sensor, peripheral device, storage (e.g., memory, database, hard disc, solid state storage) or other similar device. The communication channel may be, for example, an interconnect bus or a network connection. In order to appropriately control the resource, there may be a device that has mastership. A device or process may have mastership when it has unidirectional or bidirectional control over one or more other devices and initiates and/or coordinates transactions. Some types of master-secondary configurations allow only a single designated device to have mastership whereas others allow multiple devices to be capable of acting as master. In the latter situation, the additional devices capable of functioning as master provide a backup if the need arises, e.g., current master device fails.